“What am I gonna tell the children?” she had asked in a voice that came from deep down in her throat. “How am I going to tell them that their father committed suicide? How can they live with that knowledge?”

Now August had to go back out there again and inform the woman that her children’s father hadn’t hanged himself after all. The children would have to live with the knowledge that his death had been a much more violent one.

“What about you?” Augustin asked. “What are you going to do?”

Schäfer stood up and straightened his belt.

“I think I’m going to go have a chat with Mossing.”

CHAPTER

20

BY COUNTING THE seconds between a flash of lightning zigzagging across the sky and the thunderclap that followed, it was possible to determine how far away a storm was. In much the same way, Heloise had a theory that she could measure how far away from Copenhagen’s Stork Fountain she was by counting the number of Solarium & Spray Tanning storefronts she passed on her way: the farther she got from the bustling heart of the Danish capital, the shorter the distance between the tanning salons on her route.

She parked in front of what must have been the twelfth tanning salon she had passed in the last ten minutes and looked around.

Herlev Main Street was not the quaint provincial pedestrian shopping street she had pictured but rather a large, two-lane road flanked by what looked like recently built senior housing and a cavalcade of classic suburban businesses: a pizzeria, three women’s hair salons, two newsstands, the tanning place, and the Lantern pub.

She had tried to find the pub’s opening hours online, but the establishment didn’t have a website. Apparently, the clientele wasn’t really of the iPad/smartphone/Internet-surfing variety. It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon, and she figured that people in pubs around the city must surely have already opened their breakfast and lunch beers.

The Lantern was on a corner and had a rather confused sense of style: orangy-brown benches, Tyrolean half-timbering in the walls, cemetery flowers in vases on the tables, a Norwegian flag hanging from the ceiling, and an American rockabilly jukebox just inside the door next to a life-size cardboard cutout of Tom Jones.

Heloise skimmed the jukebox’s playlist: Big Fat Snake, Smokie, Bonnie Tyler, Dodo and the Dodos. She smiled at how predictable the selection was for a Danish pub like this and then turned her attention to an older man with a goatee and nicotine-gray skin, who was sitting at the end of the bar with his fist wrapped solidly around a bottle of beer. There wasn’t anyone else in the place, not even behind the bar.

“Huh.” He nodded to Heloise. “You look new.”

“I’m looking for the owner,” Heloise said, smiling at him.

“Jonna?”

“Yes, Jonna Kiel. Do you know where she is?”